Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Battletech tactics are much more positional than Car Wars. If you win the initiative roll in one-on-one, just put yourself in a spot where your weapons do better than his. If its lance combat, you see people saving back their small/fast mechs to move last… and then bringing them behind the slow/heavy mechs to shoot their Medium lasers into the backs.

Battletech is much more dependent on luck: a good critical hit can often take out a mech and the positions that make these shots possible can be won with a single initiative roll. Loosing three initiative rolls in a row can cost you the game!

The Car Wars dog fight moves too fast to allow such chess-like maneuvers– but initiative goes to the highest bidder! Whoever’s willing to be the most reckless (or whoever has the better acceleration) gets to move first. This crucial component of the tactical equation is NOT left to the roll of the dice!

Having initiative isn’t everything in Car Wars, but there are times where having it can be decisive. A car fired upon can automatically return fire. But if you have initiative, you can move into an opponent’s weaponless arc to fire your weapons. If you began the turn in just the right spot, he may not get a chance to return fire at all unless he’s willing to do a violent maneuver! Even if you don’t go for the kill, you can still sometimes score a point blank shot when your opponent has to be satisfied with taking a standard one.

Combining this tactic with a ram can end the game. At 80 miles an hour, you get 8 inches of movement in a single phase. Don’t end your turn within this killer zone of another car! At the same time, drivers going for this kind of position are more likely to wreck and have less control over the exact position of their car. They end up having to go straight for a lot more of their turn. The layout of the arena has a big affect on whether or not a driver can pull this off.

Compared to earlier versions of Car Wars, this is all a snap as far as rules go. Ai yai yai… the number of arguments we used to have over speed modifiers back in the days of Compendium 2nd edition! Every second of the game was fraught with bitterness– “At this angle, your car gets half it’s speed modifiers.” “No-uh!” “Yuh-huh!” And so on…. Argh!

All the angst is gone in the 5th edition. Duelists spend more time thinking about tactics and less time arguing over rules. Taking out those complicated speed modifiers REALLY helps the game a lot.

Thank you Steve Jackson!!